And then I went to the ear doctor twice in one day

But everything is peachy. Okay. Ish.

After going to bed at 11 I woke up before the alarm, not so well rested. Funny how a raging earache can do that. I did actually do my complete morning routine anyway. I ate breakfast and downed my huge mug of tea in record time to go to the ear doctor about half an hour after they opened. I wanted to bed to get an appointment the same day.

Graciously the assistant agreed to let me come in at 3.45 in the afternoon but warned me to bring lots of time.

So I walked back home and started rescheduling half the lessons for that day.

I wasn’t feeling so hot and was dithering between moving the supermarket run to today or doing it anyway but when I looked at the list it was mostly empty and so I just walked to the smaller supermarket nearby.

Came back home and took a break before lunch. We actually did eat together as a family even:

While getting ready to ear we found that we had run out of parmesan, oops. But there was some pecorino so that was nice.

Then I took a break and did the lunch dishes before walking back to the doctor’s office. This assistant was mildly alarmed at seeing my mask but I told her I was not contagious, only cautious and so she told me to wait around the corner in a lovely little room all by myself. Maybe she didn’t believe me, no idea.

I waited for quite some time but was entertained by the novel I’m reading and I had free wifi. Seeing the doctor went quickly, he told me there was already blood in my ear (not what one wants to hear), didn’t really seem to believe me when I told him I had not scratched inside my ear and put a piece of gauze with antibiotics in.

While he was working on my ear he asked me if this hurt a lot. „It certainly does hurt,“ was all I could answer and then I had that distinct and very familiar feeling that I had somehow judged my own pain wrong. I mean, yes, it did hurt a lot but, well, compared to what?

I’ll never forget something I read somewhere on social media by someone who’s autistic talking about the pain scale. Where you rate your pain from 1 to 10 (not something I’ve ever been asked to do here in Germany, but well). That (female) person walked into an ER with a broken arm. When asked about her pain level she said something around 6 or so. And therefore the doctors didn’t look at her arm properly. You see, since the pain was only about 6 it couldn’t be broken. Turns out that person thought 10 is unbearable pain and if it’s so bad that you can’t bear it it much be the kind of pain that makes you pass out. Since she didn’t pass out and could still talk and think she thought it couldn’t be a 10.

Then she learned that a broken arm ( in several places even) counts as a 10 on the pain scale and so now if someone asks her about her pain levels she compares them to that broken arm. Which is a 10.

So. Yes, my ear hurt a lot. But not that bad.

Mind you, I’ve just spent a year walking on plantar fasciitis. Every day walking around on feet that hurt in a way that the  memory alone has my mother-in-law scrunch up her face and exclaim, „Such great pain!“ emphatically.

So maybe the next time someone asks me how much something hurts I better exaggerate a bit. And don’t worry, my feet are much better already.

Anyways I walked back home via the pharmacy and the health food store for parmesan (and chocolate). I might have gained a bit of weight this week yet again because with all those doctor’s visits and chaos I needed a lot of medicinal chocolate.

Rescheduling the second student turned out to be unnecessary but I was happy to just sit and read for a bit. Then I ate a very early dinner so I could take a painkiller.

I taught my two students with my right ear almost deaf – putting a piece of gauze in there will do that – also I have a tinnitus in there and some crunching sounds. (All very familiar from past ear infections.) Then I talked with my husband a bit, started writing this post, Did Duolingo, watched something and went to bed.